Why Do We Gather

We begin with some basic questions for all of us:  Why are we here?  Why do we gather week after week for this liturgy we call Mass?

To celebrate the Sunday Eucharist some of the early followers of Christ risked their lives.  Even though there was great personal risk, the faithful were exhorted to gather.  One bishop in the early years of the faith wrote, “Let no one deprive the Church by staying away; if they do they deprive the Body of Christ of one of its members!”

Today, at least in the United States, there is no persecution of the Church.  But the statement of this third century bishop is still true: the community of believers suffers when we do not gather with it.

There are many reasons that we gather.  Some of us are here because it’s a habit.  Others come out of obligation.  Some come because their parents insist on it.  Others come to seek the Lord.  Some come because they are burdened with problems.  Others are here because they are grateful for God’s gifts.  And many of us are here for a combination of those reasons.

More basic to all of these reasons, however, is that we are here because God himself has called us here.  It was God who called us to share His own life through baptism.  It was God who called us to carry on the mission of Christ in the world today. 

And we come for Eucharist, which comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving.  We gather each week to give God thanks and praise.  Sometimes we may forget that.  It’s easy to focus on what we hope to get out of coming to church rather than on giving thanks for what God has already given us.

The most important thing we find when we gather is the presence of Christ himself.  Christ who is in each of us who has gathered.  Christ in the Word of God proclaimed.  Christ in the presider of the liturgy.  And Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

We come here to remember who we are.  Here we are reunited with one another and with He who is our head.  Those who say, “I don’t need to come to Mass to pray,” miss the point.  We’re here because God himself has asked us to be here, so that He can feed us and strengthen us to be Christ-bearers all week.

The Many Days of Easter

Most of us think of Easter as one day – a day when we eat lots of candy, visit relatives, and maybe even have an Easter egg hunt.  But, just like the Lenten Season lasts for 40+ days, the Church wants us to celebrate the Easter Season for 50 days!  

The Church reminds us that the whole Easter Season is like one glorious Sunday, during which we celebrate the thrill of knowing that Jesus’ resurrection has made it possible for us to share his life forever.  We celebrate the resurrection not by eating chocolate eggs every day, but by remembering that Christ died on the cross for us and rose again.  We must live our lives with that fact in the forefront of our minds.

The Resurrection teaches us that our death, like Jesus’ death, will not be the end.  Instead, it will be the step into a new life that will go on forever.  That’s the Easter message, and it’s such good news for all of us that it deserves a lifetime of celebration.

Let’s think about some of the days of Easter.

The first day of the Easter Season is, of course, Easter Sunday.  For us Christians, Easter is the high point of the Church’s calendar.  The date fluctuates from year to year:  last year Easter was celebrated on April 20th, and next year it falls almost a whole month earlier on March 27th.  Have you ever wondered why this most important feast moves from year to year?

Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the first day of Spring or the “Vernal Equinox” on March 21st.  What does the cycle of the Moon have to do with Easter?  Our celebration of Easter is based on the celebration of the Passover, which is when Jesus was crucified.   Our Jewish fore-bearers kept track of time on a Lunar calendar:  Passover begins the day of the first full moon after the first day of Spring.  So, planning the Holy Day based on the cycle of the moon is part of who we are in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

The first eight days following Easter are called the “Octave of Easter.”  The octave begins with Easter Sunday and concludes with the end of the Second Sunday of Easter.  These eight days are all considered “solemnities” – the highest of feast days.

The fortieth day of the Easter Season celebrates Jesus’ ascension.  He told the crowds and His disciples that He would return to the one who sent Him, and so He does.  But Jesus also tells His followers that even though He is leaving them, He will not leave them alone.  He promises to send the Holy Spirit, which He does on the 50th and last day of Easter - Pentecost.

There are many days of Easter and the Church is here to celebrate them all.  We invite you to take an active part in celebrating this Easter Season.  Just as we take time to solemnly reflect on the Passion of Christ during Lent, we are called to celebrate Christ’s resurrection throughout the Easter Season by keeping it in the forefront of our minds and attending Mass every week.

Shalom

Over the past year we’ve hosted three Healing Services.  These services brought our community together to strive for a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and to pray for the healing of memories, family-life, and grief.

There are so many areas of our lives where we need healing.  We are surrounded by an aggressive culture and live in a violent world.  Daily we are bombarded with images of brutality in our cities and in countries around the globe.  As we see these images we become accustomed to the violence they portray and can begin to accept it as normal.

The reality is that on any given day the media presents us with more violence than our grandparents might have witnessed in their entire lives.  While we see the result of this cruelty in the news, much of it is “make believe” in television shows; but as any psychologist can tell you, the mind knows no difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined. 

Daily, we see images of mass murders in Africa; reflections of violent crime portrayed on television and first-person shooter video games; websites devoted to glorifying the actions of murderers and psychopaths; and more.  Our society, and especially our children, come to understand that we handle our problems through violent acts instead of dialogue and conversation. 

Jesus told His disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.” He goes on to tell them that He doesn’t give peace as the world gives it.  We understand peace to be the absence of conflict.  But the peace that Jesus refers to is the Jewish concept of “Shalom” (Shă - lōm).  Most of us understand Shalom means “peace,” but that’s only a small part of the meaning.  Shalom means completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, and harmony.  In short, Shalom means perfect and full peace living in right relationship with each other and with God.  This is the kind of peace Jesus gives: this is the kind of peace that we’re missing in our world today.

We will gather on Sunday, April 19^th at 5:30 PM to explore the inner peace and global peace that Shalom calls us to.  Through music, prayer and reflections we will look to rid ourselves of those things that serve to distract and prevent us from true peace.  

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is a wake-up call.  It hits us squarely between the eyes, forcing us to face our own mortality and sinfulness. 

On Wednesday we will hear Scripture readings that are urgent and vivid.  The Prophet Joel tells us that God wants us to return to Him with our whole hearts and to acknowledge our sinfulness with fasting and weeping and mourning.  In the Gospel reading Jesus reminds us that our fasting, our prayers and our almsgiving are important ways to atone for our sinfulness, but we must do so in such a way that only God sees what we’re doing.   Jesus criticizes pious self displays, not pious actions.

We have black ashes rubbed into our foreheads, ashes from the Palms that we so excitedly waved last year on Palm Sunday.  We recite a Litany of Penitence that takes our breath away, or should.  It’s a tough day, but take heart!  This is one religious day that won’t fall into the clutches of retailers.  There aren’t any Hallmark cards celebrating sin and death; no shop windows are decked out with sackcloth and ashes.

On Ash Wednesday we come to church to kneel, to pray, and to ask God’s forgiveness, surrounded by other sinners.  Human sin is universal; we all do it, not only Christians.  But our church tradition sets aside Ash Wednesday as a particular day to address sin and death.  We are ALL sinners, no better and no worse than our brothers and sisters. This is not a day to compete ("my sins are worse than yours are"), but to a day to confess.

Most of us don’t spend much time thinking about death.  But death is the great equalizer. In death there are no CEO’s, no janitors; no rich, no poor. All of us are in the hands of the loving God—that's it. The trinkets of honor and position of this world are but dust and ashes.  When we remember, to dust we shall return, we remember that we are made for more than trinkets or honor.  We are made for life with God - now and forever.

Ash Wednesday is the gateway to Lent.  We have forty precious days to open ourselves up to God, to examine ourselves in the presence of the one who created us, knows us, and loves us.  We have forty days to face ourselves and learn not to be afraid of our sinfulness.  We are dust, but with God’s grace we can learn to live this life more fully, embracing our sinfulness, allowing God to transform us.

Ash Wednesday gives us the opportunity to gather in prayer, not so much to inform God of our needs – but to express our dependence upon Him.

Our Lady of Lourdes

On Tuesday, February 11^th we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.  157 years ago the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl by the name of Bernadette Soubirous (Sew-be-roos) at Lourdes in Southern France.  Between January and July of 1858 a woman, dressed in white, belted in blue, with yellow roses at her feet and a golden rosary in her hands, appeared to this simple 14-year-old girl eighteen times.  Just like the woman wearing a belted dress with roses who appeared to the peasant Juan Diego in Mexico 300 years before, the Lady who appeared to Bernadette asked for a church to be built on the site.

Only a few years before, Pope Pius the ninth had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as an infallible teaching.  The vision Bernadette encountered told her “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

Bernadette was a sickly child of poor parents. Their practice of the Catholic faith was scarcely more than lukewarm. Bernadette could pray the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Creed, but little more.  Through this humble girl, a girl of about the same age that she was when she bore the Lord, Mary revitalized and continues to revitalize the faith of millions of people.  Within just a few years of the apparition, people began to flock to Lourdes from other parts of France and from all over the world. The Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes became worldwide in 1907.

For a century and a half Lourdes has been a place of pilgrimage and healing, but even more of faith. Of the 30 or 40 cures reported annually, Church authorities have recognized over 60 of them as miraculous.  There still may be people who doubt the apparitions of Lourdes, and it is not necessary for our faith to believe.  Perhaps the best that can be said to them are the words that introduce the film The Song of Bernadette: “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.”

Next Wednesday, February 11^th, as we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, in addition to our regular 7:00 AM Mass, we will have a Mass of Healing at noon.  During this Mass we will examine the many areas of our lives, body, mind, and spirit that need to be healed.  Father will also anoint the ill and pray over those who need healing. 

                                

What Do We Mean By “Pro-Life?”

If you looked at Thursday, January 22nd on your Catholic calendar, you know it was described as a day of penance because of the atrocity of abortion and also a day of prayer for the legal guarantee of the right to life. This day of reflection has occurred every January since the Supreme Court upheld the legalization of abortion in 1973. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have participated in the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., lobbying for pro-life legislation.

But what does it really mean to be “pro-life?”

                                                 

As Catholics, we understand that because life begins at conception, abortion is wrong. The Catechism says, “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. …”  (Paragraph 2270) For this reason, we must be concerned with protecting the lives of unborn children. For some, that means praying outside clinics or volunteering at organizations that support unwed mothers; for others, it means working to change a system that disenfranchises young, pregnant women.

But being pro-life involves so much more, and as Catholics, we are called to be pro-life even when it is difficult. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wants us to broaden the scope of our parish pro-life activities by pointing out life issues deserving of our attention and efforts: Capital Punishment; People Living with Disabilities; End of Life Issues; Health Care; War; and Hunger, to name just a few.

The USCCB says that, “Increasingly, our society looks to violent measures to deal with some of our most difficult social problems – millions of  abortions to address problem pregnancies, advocacy of euthanasia and assisted suicide to cope with the burdens of age and illness, and increased reliance on the death penalty to deal with crime.  We are tragically turning to violence in the search for quick and easy answers to complex human problems…”

As we consider our stand on life issues, we must embrace the concept that being pro-life is more than simply being anti-abortion. It is not for us to judge which lives are innocent and which are not – that discernment is for God alone. Rather, we must believe, as the Catechism tells us, that every human life is sacred because we are all made in the image and likeness of God. (Paragraph 2319) “Our witness to respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life…”

Octave of Christian Unity

Traditionally, the Church celebrates the Octave of Christian Unity between January 18th and 25th which are appropriately the Feasts of St. Peter and St. Paul.  These feasts have symbolic importance as Peter was the Apostle to the Jews and Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles.

During these eight days we are to concentrate on what all Christians have in common and to stop focusing upon our differences.  We are to pray as Jesus did to His Father, “that they may be one as you and I are one.”

Instead of unity the Church experiences greater and greater division as we enter further into an era of religious competition whereby some Congregational churches seek to increase their membership by denigrating and insulting traditional churches, like the Catholic Church. 

Instead of denigrating and insulting each other we are to reach out to those who share a belief in Jesus the Christ.  A major focus of the Second Vatican Council was the work of Christian unity, known as ecumenism. In the years leading up to the Council, Saint John XXIII showed a great attentiveness and openness to the Holy Spirit, making it clear that work and prayer for Christian unity is inseparable from the Church’s mission to evangelize.

In his opening address to the Council he said, "The Catholic Church considers it her duty to work actively so that there may be fulfilled the great mystery of… unity, which Jesus Christ invoked with fervent prayer from His heavenly Father on the eve of His sacrifice…”

With the arrival of Pope Francis and his insistence on trusting others and learning from them, a resurgence in the ecumenical movement is underway.  The Christian churches seem poised, for the first time in a long time, for a major reconciliatory breakthrough.

In his encyclical “The Joy of the Gospel” Pope Francis calls for unity when he writes, “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this invitation is not meant for him or her, since “no one is excluded from the joy brought by the Lord””. 

We are the messengers Jesus is using in the world today to bring His message of love and unity to everyone we encounter.